Looking back, Looking Forward (The Move, Part 1)

The week between Christmas and New Year’s is often a time of reflection on the past year, and looking ahead to the year about to begin. It’s been that way for a long time; the very month of January is named for Janus, a Roman god with two faces that always looks forward and back at the same time. This week, I’m looking back at an event that has been major concern at the Museum for a number of years—and one that I’m looking forward to completing in 2011; our move into the Esplanade.

Some of you may be thinking, “didn’t they move to the Esplanade, like, five years ago?” And so we did; sort of. The Esplanade building was completed in 2005, with our first travelling exhibit installed in October that year, and the permanent museum gallery opening in December. But as anyone who’s ever moved into a new house can tell you, getting functional in a new space is a long way away from being fully moved in.

Our preparations for the move began in 2003, with the building of new storage boxes for our glass and ceramic collections. These had previously been stored on free-standing open shelves—the kind you might find at a Value Village store (I must admit, I thought twice about making that comparison, as it’s not the most flattering to the Museum—but it does give you an accurate picture). While low-tech, that system worked fine in our old building (which, by the way, was located by the junction of Higways 1 and 3—Wynz Night Club occupies the building now). But, back then the shelves were set up firmly on the basement floor; in the Esplanade, the glass and ceramics are stored on a high-density mobile shelving system. This is a really cool system that has all of our shelves on platforms that roll along tracks in the floor. That way, we can jam them all together, and only need space for one aisle, which we can open up anywhere we need it. This enables us to get a lot more stuff on the same floor space. Problem is, with mobile shelves, even the most efficient will still create a bit of vibration. This vibration will make glass and ceramics “walk” across the shelves, with disastrous results if and when these fragile pieces walk right off the edge. So, our exhibit technician Sam Ferrier made over a thousand plastic boxes to house these collections, with an average of six or eight pieces per box. The individual pieces still move around a bit due to vibrations, but they just move a little in their own plastic cells; the boxes are too heavy to be moved by the vibrations. These boxes not only prepared the glass and ceramics for the Esplanade, but also essentially packed them for the move.

Our other collections also had to be inventoried and packed for the move. We couldn’t really start that until 8 or 9 months before the move. We had to shut down our old exhibits before we could start packing because we a) needed to get the artefacts out of those exhibits in order to pack them, and b) because we needed the gallery space to store the packed collections until the Esplanade’s storage area was ready to move into. But, we had to do more that just throw things into boxes; we had to be able to track every artefact in every box, in case we needed a particular piece before the unpacking was completed. The only way we were able to get it done was through a group of fantastic volunteers that contributed hundreds of hours to inventory and pack more than 20,000 pieces.

This is starting to get a bit wordy, so I’ll leave it for now, and pick up next week with the move and unpacking process, and where we are with it today.

Happy New Year, everyone!

The Christmas Carousel

When I was an Archaeology undergrad student in the late 1980s, I remember picking up a piece of 1,500 year old pottery, and placing my thumb and index finger into the very “pinch” the potter made to decorate the rim of the pot. It was an extraordinary moment of connection with another person I’ve never met, over a great gulf of time, through a single object.

Working in museums, I’ve been fortunate to experience this kind of connection many times, although never as viscerally as that first time. One of the big challenges that museums face is in trying to bring that kind of experience to our visitors. Today, for Christmas Eve, I’d like to share another experience I’ve had, with the toy carousel pictured here.

When I first started with the museum in 2002 (it was then called the Medicine Hat Museum and Art Gallery), the carousel didn’t look like much. It had been taken apart to better fit on our too-crowded storage shelves, so it was a jumble of beams, boards, cardboard and fabric. It had been that way for years, and I left it that way for a few years more. But, in 2005 the Esplanade was nearing completion, and we had to prepare our collections for the move into their new home. I didn’t even know if the carousel was complete--the only way to figure that out was to put it together. It was the kind of job where you wish you had five or six hands instead of two—a lot of “hold this and this, while trying to fit this into that and there” business. With the final piece, though, everything just snapped into shape; it was like setting the keystone into an arch. Not only was this previously frail piece now strong and rigid, but whole thing balanced beautifully from the top peak, and a gentle push was all that was needed to send it ‘round, and ‘round, and ‘round…

The carousel was so much stronger assembled that we moved it that way, with just a bit of crumpled paper beneath it to support the floor through the move, and to keep the whole thing from turning. We still store it that way, fully assembled.

The carousel made such an impression on me (not only from the precision of its construction, but also its size—it’s 66 cm in diameter, and 60 cm high), that when I had an opportunity to develop an exhibit based on our collection, I chose toys as the theme—so we could show off this piece (that exhibit, “Playful Revelations,” ran July through October 2009). It was in the course of researching that exhibit that I found the carousel had been made by Tom Woods, an employee of the Canadian Pacific Railway, around 1920. Mr. Woods cut out the beams and floorboards, and his wife stitched the fabric and sewed on the beads and bells. The carousel was displayed in the Woods’ Braemer Street home every Christmas, and was a popular attraction throughout the neighbourhood. The donor of the carousel, a family friend of the Woods, recalled being one of the child admirers of this piece. The carousel was first exhibit by the Museum over Christmas 1995 (the first Christmas after the carousel was donated) as a nod to the Woods' tradition.

In that spirit of child-like awe for a marvellous toy, I’d like to extend to you the Esplanade Museum’s best wishes for a Merry Christmas.

Esplanade Museum 2.0

This past week, the Esplanade Museum in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada, took the leap into Social Media.

I know what you’re thinking—“big whup. Everybody and their dog is into Social Media these days.”

And, you’d be right. According to statistics, 2 in 5 Canadians are on Facebook, 65 million tweets are made every day, and 22% of all online time is spent on social network related sites.

But, museums tend to be rather conservative—it’s part of our nature. In some cases being slow to engage in a course of action works well for us, such as for ensuring the preservation of artifacts (tip: never resort to using masking tape, Scotch tape, Crazy Glue or elastic bands to hold together something you value; over the course of months and years, it will cause irreparable damage to what you were trying to keep safe). Worse than that, though, is that museums have too often regarded themselves as the “experts” and “content specialists,” and there’s been a general reluctance to share that authority in the content free-for-all that is the social media scene. Museums Spoke, and Visitors Listened; that was the extent of the dialogue. I offer this not by way of excuse, but rather by way of explanation.

It never should have been that way. It’s a holdover from ancient empires where the first “museums” were state showcases of treasure stolen from conquered enemies. Those spaces were designed to be elitist, and to remind the people of the power of their rulers. Museums got (mostly) away from that a long time ago. Our most important job now is to preserve the experience of people. Sure, sometimes it’s about famous people, and sometimes it’s about powerful people. But it’s also about Charles Colter, a stonemason who in the 1890s rigged up some of Medicine Hat’s first gas lines to light a neighbourhood skating rink. Or Annie Carson, Medicine Hat’s relief officer during the Great Depression, who didn’t have a car so walked miles and miles to distribute food and clothing to people in need. Or the employees of Medalta or Altaglass, who made products that were known all across Canada; or the gas and oil workers of the 1970s petroleum boom; or you, reading this now—today—and participating in an extraordinary communications revolution.

Museums are social institutions; we’re about people. We can’t do our job if we aren’t where the people are. It’s in this spirit that we’ve set about creating a social media presence. We’re starting slowly—daily tweets on Twitter (look for us as EsplanadeMuseum), and this weekly blog. Our aim is to learn more about our community, and enable our community to learn more about us. We’re looking forward to joining the conversation.